The Mind: Aristotle Kant And Socrates :: essays research papers

&65279Daniel C. Dennet said in A Glorious Accident that, "our minds--if you like-- are fitting asreal as our dreams"(Kayzer, 37). The implications of this statement are substantial, for if this istrue--if our minds and our consciousness are just dreams or the constructs of our brain, what weperceive, our memories, and our sense of reality are nonhing more than illusions. Not only is thisscientifically a valid statement, but it forces us to question who we are, and what we know . It isthe latter that is of interest at this moment. What I lack to do in this essay is to tie together thisconcept of detection and the mind with what we have read in Text and Critics, as advantageously as todiscuss the need for science to find "reality" and "knowledge."     But, first, we essential understand what Dennet means by our minds being as real as ourdreams. Dennets point is profound and a point that should not be disregard as a whim of aphilo sopher but, instead, a scientific reality-- not the construct of a mans subjective mind. One isled to believe that the lift out way to describe the mind as an illusion is to describe it in terms ofdreams. When we sleep, our extraneous sensorial input is close down. However, our minds, when wedream, are not in a very different state than when we are awake, separate than as said before that ourexternal sensory input is shut down. Thus, we can conclude that, our waking state is just as illusionary as our dreams, though with supplementary external sources of information. When dreaming, we obviously receive sensory input that enables our minds to create dreams with sights,sounds, touch, taste, emotions, experience, and sometimes even smell. If there is no externalsensory input, we must logically imply that it is coming from internal sources in the brain, the close obvious one being retrospection. Immediately, we can agree that memory is a subjective sourceof reality, as we can see i n the moderation in which memory fills in its missing gaps with often foolish information (often influenced by our personal bias) as well as the ease in which memorycan be altered or subjugate and false memory can be created. So, immediately, by looking at                                                   S. Brown 2dreams, we can see that one source of our intelligence is subject to all sorts of editing by the brain.While the subjectivity of the memories is most evident during the dream state, our memory is